The Baltimore Sun on School Vouchers

No child should be left to languish in a school where teachers are unprepared, books are as scarce as gold and “reforms” crop up and disappear like flavors of the month. But lots of poor kids are.

Take a peek into any one of dozens of public schools in cities like Baltimore, and you’ll see them: Children who aren’t learning anything, who are being doomed to life in poverty, and whose parents would send them somewhere else — anywhere else — if only they had a choice.

And there’s the magic word. Choice.

Over the last decade or so, it has become a mantra for those who believe the solution to public school woes is to break their so-called monopoly on education for the poor.

Give poor parents “vouchers” for the money that would go to the public schools, and let them choose how to spend it. Private schools. Parochial schools. Wherever they want.

The kids who would leave the public schools would get a better education, and the kids left behind would be in schools that would improve because choice would force them to compete for enrollment.

It sounds great, even liberating. And several cities are experimenting with choice programs — mostly involving vouchers — that have produced at least some success in improving the educational options for impoverished families.

But as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether the Cleveland voucher program violates constitutionally mandated church and state separations by allowing public dollars to pay for religious education, it’s worth looking more closely at the promise and pitfalls associated with the whole idea of choice.

If the court OKs the Cleveland program, similar ventures could appear in several more cities across the country, including Baltimore.

And while choice is often sold as the magic bullet that could salvage public education in this country, we should all know by now that no such thing exists.

In theory, choice doesn’t present much with which to quibble — but, then, the problems with it aren’t so much philosophical as they are practical. The upside of educational choice is pretty clear. Its proponents say vouchers empower poor parents with the resources rich parents have had for years. It’s about fairness and opportunity, they say — not measurably different from federal housing programs that allow poor families to select where they live rather than confining them to drab, unsafe housing projects.

The choice movement is often associated with conservatives motivated by the generally sound notion that the competition offered by vouchers would help eliminate waste and inefficiencies in public schools.

But some polls suggest that many of the strongest proponents of choice are, in fact, African-American parents whose children are stuck in the awful public schools that dot the urban landscape.

Indeed, one of the largest groups lobbying for more vouchers and choice programs is the Black Alliance for Educational Options. The group represents hundreds of parents in several areas, including Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida and Washington, D.C., who want more for their children than they’ve gotten from the public schools. More than 700 rallied outside the Supreme Court when it heard arguments in the Cleveland case on Wednesday.

In theory, choice doesn’t present much with which to quibble — but, then, the problems with it aren’t so much philosophical as they are practical.

Vouchers, for example, won’t necessarily pay the freight at private institutions whose tuitions are frequently three or four times the per-pupil spending of a public school.

And even if tuition can be taken care of, what about transportation, money for books and extracurriculars that are so much a part of school life?

True poverty often means a lack of access to things such as cars and cash for uniforms and books.

Any program that purports to give poor people educational choice can’t ignore the things beyond tuition that bar many people from private education.

There’s also the question of whether choice cuts both ways in voucher programs. No public school can turn a child away. But does a voucher extend that obligation to private schools, which often build their reputations on selectivity?

Vouchers also threaten to exacerbate poverty in public schools by “skimming off the top” those kids with parents who will take advantage of the programs. The poorest children, who have parents with neither the resources nor the sophistication to pursue private education, will be left behind. And they’ll be attending schools that have even fewer resources to meet the needs of their impoverished students. What will happen to them?

The Cleveland case before the Supreme Court will legally settle the church-state issues surrounding choice, but likely won’t satisfy all concerns about the constitutional backsliding that has produced more and more public money slipping into religious coffers.

Vouchers won’t bring more qualified teachers to public schools; they won’t produce more money for books or materials or maintenance; and they won’t extend the social safety net that is stretched too thin in public schools to meet the needs of the kids who attend. Any choice program ought to very carefully avoid the appearance or reality of a government imprimatur for any particular brand of religious education.

Some voucher proponents offer strong counterarguments to the practical hurdles with choice, saying they are programmatic in nature and therefore can be hammered out.

Howard Fuller, a Wisconsin educator who played a prominent role in crafting Milwaukee’s choice program, trumpets that city’s record in dealing with transportation, private school selectivity and other issues. Schools that participate in the program can’t turn kids away. Transportation is handled no differently than it is for public schools.

Still, that city’s program has had its problems.

Several schools that opened specifically to cater to children using public school vouchers have had to close because of financial and programmatic problems.

It’s also true that Milwaukee’s experience might not translate to other cities. Most private schools there, for example, are parochial institutions with relatively low tuitions.

Baltimore, by contrast, has fewer low-cost religious schools and an abundance of well-heeled, exclusive private schools that are extremely selective and expensive. Would the Milwaukee model work here? Probably not.

At bottom, it’s important that the debate over choice not ignore these facts: Vouchers won’t bring more qualified teachers to public schools; they won’t produce more money for books or materials or maintenance; and they won’t extend the social safety net that is stretched too thin in public schools to meet the needs of the kids who attend.

They are not a panacea for the problems plaguing public education. For that reason, this whole discussion cannot be allowed to drown out the cries for a rededication of resources and effort toward improving the public schools that serve all our children.

That’s what our state constitutions all guarantee, and it’s the mandate we have yet to fulfill in urban centers where children are stuck in inadequate, underachieving schools.

This editorial on a complicated subject flows quite nicely and is very readable. The writer seems to want to lure the reader with points that could hardly be rejected, a technique that often works well. A reader may think at first that TheSun favors school vouchers (perhaps a popular position if one believes the schools are a total mess) and thus be disarmed when the editorial concludes just the opposite.

The editorial takes an uninterrupted negative view of the public schools in Baltimore; I wondered whether this is justified. Noting that there are exceptions (if there are any) might have made these comments fairer.

It makes good points about the factors other than tuition that complicate the subject of vouchers: transportation, money for books and extracurricular activities, etc. I wish it had not used “extracurriculars” as if there were such a word. And we could do without the mixed imagery of a sentence saying that “hurdles” (difficulties with a voucher plan) can be “hammered out.”

About halfway into the editorial it says that the Cleveland case “will legally settle the church-state issues surrounding choice,” but that isn’t necessarily so. The court could void the Cleveland plan on some other grounds, such as the inadequacy of the low voucher payments in providing a real choice.

One editorial can’t cover all aspects of the voucher question, but a couple of things it might have addressed are these:

• In Cleveland, 99 percent of the students receiving vouchers are going to Catholic schools and none or hardly any to more expensive private schools. And choice does not include moving from one Ohio public school system to another, since other systems decline to take the vouchers from Cleveland. So how much real choice is there? The editorial does quite rightly point out that the private schools don’t have to accept a public school student, though the public schools must accommodate all. This still further reduces choice.

• The editorial makes the excellent point that vouchers may remove some of the best students from the public schools, weakening them, and may drain funds that could have improved the public schools. I’d like to know whether Cleveland and Ohio have allocated funds for vouchers without any reduction of funds for public schools. If they haven’t, shouldn’t any voucher plan be based upon some new source of revenue? And couldn’t that new source have strengthened the public schools?

As for the question of usefully creating competition for the public schools, it might have been said that there is no level playing field if the private schools don’t have to admit any student applying and provide all educational services — including the range of the curriculum — that the public schools offer.

Another arguing point for The Sun: Why is it that after all these years of discussion of vouchers, which have been examined as an option by schools throughout the country, only a few cities have taken that course?